in america volume 22 part 1 - 2010-11 dec-jan  work & days: a lifetime journal project

6 Dec 2010

The semester's done -

7

Was euphoric last night at being able to drop this semester's mess of students. Karyn in her last packet plagiarized some Patanjali scholar I'm on the hunt for.

Someone in Dublin, someone in Rio, coming to W&D through Facebook, presumably Ben's link.

Katie the only pleasure, and she in her eval doesn't say what I gave her, as if she doesn't know it.

- Still the pleasure of Kenner's Pound. Further on, what I liked in him in 1980 I know more about, brain as a fountain, universe as a wave structure, erotic love as the difference, steady pagan disregard of Christian teaching, which I thank him for.

Is it that what I give them is so relevant to them they think they themselves found it?  
Whereas I've tracked bits of that relevance for 45 years, or 50  

-

Chorus Niagara in a food court in Welland ON, flash mob, beautiful Youtube video. Food chain banality highjacked by joyful daring. Singers and random hearers lit up. The man at 3.24 so lovely I stop the video to touch his face on screen, his look like what I felt in music in London, pained wonder.

There has also been an extreme snowboarder on a Nepalese mountain, a piece of red silk dancing in a circle of fans, a man showing what he can do in a wheel.

-

Came out of the Museum of Natural History when it closed at five and from the top of the steps saw the new moon in a yellow sky. Inside, a slender green mamba five feet long, a pair of moonstone earrings, and a translucent white roof accordion-pleated over thin struts and a five floor drop. From the top floor a wide view north over the largest tree toward little blue triangles of mountain over east.

[opposite pages]

Light metaphysics

Scotus Erigena is omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt.

neo-Greek theology

Letter to the Ephesians, omne quod manifestatur, lumen est.

"Bishop Grosseteste's deduction of the whole universe from light." "When it has reached the extreme of its rarefaction it is that of which things are made."

radiant gists, for a while in the 13th century, held in many intellects

the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with a clean edge, a world of moving energies

mezzo oscuro rade

"Risplende in se perpetuale effecto," magnetisms that take form, that are seen, or that border the visible, the matter of Dante's Paradiso, the glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror, these realities perceptible to the sense, interacting

Love, said Cavalcanti, takes rise in Memory's locus - "In quella parte dove sta memoria" - and radiates like Light, "himself his own effect unendingly."

risplende
in se perpetuale effecto

the tensile light

light-philosophers

sincerity the attaining of precision of speech with oneself

irresponsible peddlers of the ineffable 454

Illumine the root of the process ... the bones of things, the materials, are implicit and prepared in us, abundant and inseparable from us ... (Pound 1945)

was Taoist in his deepest impulses ... he could respond to places ... with a geomancer's perception of hill and shade.

The mind is a fountain, sculptured water.

interested, that is, beyond philology, in how the bard breathed by rhythmic gesture as the structure of sound is built up, prolonged, modulated ... so far as possible breathing as it breathed, intoning as it intoned,

The process has traversed in half a page the history of English versification from Chaucer to 1945, decasyllabic becoming pentameter, pentameter encountering Imagist resistance, and metamorphosing into the idiosyncratically stressed line that carries Pound's hallmark.

Anaphora (repeating beginnings), internal rhyme, witty diction.

a world where the sphere of adventure is the imagination, and where mastery achieved by labor may open the mind to possession by minds past

Frobenius paideuma basically whole cultural style.

Only a whole mobilized tradition.

Mark Twain structured five dialects in Huckleberry Finn.

He had less working time left than he knew.

Released 1958, 1960 "My head just doesn't WORK," d. 1970.

8

Mary calling in the middle of the day to rave about her red amaryllis. It has four flowers.

My begonia's flowers have gone white because it isn't in a window. I've put it outside on the air conditioner block for two days during daylight and it has its deep pink back.

After two weeks without agave in tea, or main carbs, morning down to under 144, which I haven't been since the res last Jan I think. Feeling it as sore bum when I sit working. Went away when I was heavier. Black jeans still tight at the waist.

Morning scrambling to organize OAS evidence. Internal revenue, the OAS office, tax folder for 2002. Shd I ask Paul for a letter.

9

Pleased with myself because I was thinking ahead to taxes on pension and discovered tax-free savings accounts in time to register for one before the end of the tax year so I will have extra space rolled over into next year, which will mean I won't have to pay taxes on it when it comes.

And booked a service for the jeep. And am still trying to track down the plagiarized essay. And am dealing with waist blubber. And washed the floor. And have a paycheck in with hardly any draws on it, finally.

-

So went back to the science museum and bought moonstone earrings -

Stable incubation period of three or so billion years for life to develop.

10

I will sometimes find a feather on my doormat and feel they've said thank you.

[opposite page website fix lists for entire site]

12

Lucia Popp singing Litanei auf das Fest aller Seelen.

Ruhe in Freiden aller Seelen
Die vollbracht ein Bangen quälen
Die vollendet süzen Traum
Lebensatt der Welt hinüberschieden
Aller Seelen ruhe in Frieden
 
Liebervoller Mädchen Seelen
Deren Tränen nicht zu zählen
Die ein falschen Freund verließ
Alle die von Hinnen schieden
Aller Seelen ruhe in Frieden
 
Und die nie der Sonne lachten
Unterm Mond auf Dornen wachten
Gott in reinen Himmelslight
Einst zu sehn von Angesicht
Alle die von Hinnen schieden
Aller Seelen ruhe in Frieden

I'm thinking of my mom's funeral as I listen to this song again and again, and discover Schubert wrote it when his mother died. He was 19.

several chillingly dark songs

Buried next to Beethoven "whom he had admired all his life."

-

I've entered the black turtleneck age. Black turtleneck, UGGs and baggy silk pants if poss. And simple earrings with good stones.

-

5:04 Sunday night. A Santa Ana, western sky through the window stained its winter apricot, tall white candle lit next to it, and spotlight on gorgeous Padmasambhava. - Who I discover in Wiki is a Nyingma guy.

5:16 it's dark on land and the apricot has deepened at the horizon, fades up through yellow to pale and then darker turquoise to dull navy. I have the door open, a cup with cream waiting on the cooling hotplate as the tea steeps. Very soon I'll go do an eval in this lovely winter room - now a lovely winter room. Have brought the begonia in from its work day in the sun and it is looking exuberant in its dark gloss and new pink.

Last week Louie thought to look into Fading and said things about the bits she read that I liked to hear. "Balanced between spontaneity and reflection / I don't feel control in the recordings / it's crispy clean."

Struck me that if her mom died she might like me to go to the funeral with her.

13

Took care of the jeep today. 107,146, minor service, meaning oil, fluids, rotate tires, tire pressure, inspect a lot of things -

As I was on the way to mail Dave Scott's 4Gb flash drive with my slides on it, found an envelope with another $1000 from him to edit his novel.

14

Alzheimers and fasting - theory that amyloid isn't cleaned up, builds up in default network - lower glucose in - less is produced in sleep - it's not the focused network - hippocampus and some other.

15

Radio silence on email, even most spam is gone [later: news item says Russian spam sources shut down].

16

Three and a half hours pruning at Scott's this aft, it'll rain tomorrow. My favorite spot today was the tropical room, now an open space with thick high edges. The flagstone path's broad and solid. Two of the ferns spread. Ivy grown though patchy, two of the daturas very tall. Both the interesting hard-leafed shrubs, whatever they are, completely right for their spots. The whole square damp, dark and unusual like a garden in another sort of country, Vietnam maybe.

In the side yard the dark pink salvia's almost gone. In the front the cistus ladanifer had grown thick and overhead, blooming white on just the tips. It was bulging out of the corner and I cut off a 4" trunk. Thinned the Graham Thomas. The bay laurel is at the eaves and has more shape finally. Garcia has mutilated the apricot.

There was only a little to do in the gravel garden. California poppies self seeded, a winter salvia blooming wine red, pineapple sage very spread, the ceanothus hiding what it was meant to hide, the little lysiloma wrapped around the fountain.

Pulled the silverlace vine out of the pepper tree, see whether it can recover. Cleaned up the dead sticks of the passiflora the monarchs had devoured.

Then tonight The lover on Netflix, exquisitely visual, Jane March at 18, Tony Leung's bronze bum.

17

[opposite page, notes on sound equipment and audio recording]

Luke isn't answering his phone.

I'm looking at audio recorders thinking of the tax year.

Imagining recording silence - sound recordists call it air - for that maybe $1200 plus headphones and maybe a mic.

What do you think  
I need it this year  

-

Email from a reader who begins, Greetings wanderer.

Do you have a sense of what my workshop should be  
What is a mind     no
Light and seeing     no
?     balance, completion, judgment and action
What I need to do     no
What it's about  
Dragon girl     no
Will you slant this     the Work
About you?     no
The two hands     YES
"Part of me is in the dark"     YES
What is a person  
Le Guin Left hand of darkness  
What is intuition  
Conscious and unconscious  
What is a mind is the intro  
Hilgard  
 
Stories:
Hilgard
Joanna Field
Clairvoyant
Something from
Images: the half people
Fairy tradition - larger, smaller
Two sides of the brain
What is ego?
What is self?
Creative unconscious
The shadow, the larger self, the child
The unconscious in a democracy
Ego and inflation
Porous attention

There is a stream but consciousness is not it, c is like a chip riding on it.

-

Levy-Strauss in Myth and meaning - Indians able to see the planet Venus in broad daylight with the naked eye, in Daniel Pinchbeck Breaking open the head

Coincidences. Feeling other people's feelings.
Silence, time slowing, vision in 360 degrees.
 
Out-of-body becomes near after-death if longer
Right temporal lobe
Anyone who'd had near-death, need less sleep, go into REM later. Depressed people enter sooner, people who've had near-death later than normals. More sync in L temporal.
Meditation decrease in R parietal, orientation assoc.
When parietal's quiet, R temporal religiosity comes on more.

I became the best possible version of myself.

18

[code for podcast links]

Don't ask don't tell repealed today.

Laughing with Luke this morning. At his window, horizontal snow. He has no place, no job, no girlfriend, and is wondering about balloon piloting. "I always like talking to you." "Me too, I always like it so much."

He had lunch with Roy and dinner with his brothers. Walked in the snow. Jill sent a text.

I said that after 40 one needs to be strategic about mating. Think what one needs and where to find it and once found how to attract it. He looks at kids in supermarkets. I said go to the British Library and pick a reading room. Then one can stand next to her in the lunchroom line.

Netflix movies on my Mac monitor.

Journal reader in Van sent a photo of himself. Polite reply. Sent an Orion piece today. One line reply. Just now something about his reply to that, that scared me. First time I've realized I can be stalked. The word 'hooked' in his first email - isn't it the second time someone has said that.

19

Think more about what it was about him. Yesterday I shied off doing that because he might read it. This morning I'm not as weak-headed. I was repelled by the photo - that he had sent a photo, the kind of photo it was, and the face itself. It was posed against a big colored painting suggesting vivid emotion and showed a lady's man with blue eyes and a wavy forelock, a drinker's blur maybe, something weakly evasively seductive. What he wrote both times implied a grand and vague common interest in humanity, which I dislike because he isn't saying what he wants, he wants something, and because he was posing as thinking of us as equals, which we are not. Ben Robins did it better. Straight ahead and talking about the writing.

Someone in Barcelona, a good part of town near parks and the sea, has been coming in through the index with no referring link six days in a row, and then not going into theory, writing, graphics or the journal.

Have been a lot of days avoiding the last three evals and fixing the Fading section, little format stuff. Four vols left, I'll finish it today and then do the evals and then get to Emilee's book and mine.

19

Wachtel interviewed on Writers & Co.

A journal thread about reading.

20

Have spent $1300 just now for an audio setup, Marantz field recorder, Rode cardioid stereo mic, Shure headphones, rechargeable batteries and charger, mic stand.

Why - I'm picturing myself in Glorietta Canyon recording silence - later on maybe in Alberta - and setting it up in this room making podcast recordings maybe.

Trimming photos for Up north 1-1 this morning, had them large on the monitor. They are so soft and loving.

Raining today, palm fronds flailing as they do, thick silver daylight. Airplanes taking off to the east, overhead. I've booked room 21 at the Hacienda del Sol for the 23rd to the 25th. It won't be enough.

Beginning to work on Up north. Bit scared of it.

21

Toward eight in the morning. It's pouring. Drops all over the north window. Tuesday.

Something about the loud dark scumbling rumble overhead, over air full of water. It makes me feel submerged as if I'm at the bottom of the ocean and a ship is passing over me.

These rain days also are like the intercalated days, blacked out of the calendar, in parentheses, enclosed.

-

Diedre's eval, ie her transcript summary and my grad intro. I need to settle about her more, we had a thrilling first semester and then she got handed to other advisors, who I want to think wasted her time and in some ways spoiled her work.

Is that correct     no
They gave her good things  
Caryn was just right for the next stage  
Reconnecting in art and writing  
Then her next semester with me was less good  
Because she was battling in her life  
Did she succeed in that battle  
Was Lise helpful to her     no
Was I right to slam that work  
Does she honestly agree  
Lise screwed up because she was competing with me  
Were the feminist texts important to her  
She was weak in relation to Lise     no
It was a mistake to take that job     no
Will she get into a PhD  
Feminist epistemology  
She mistrusts me now     YES
Because of what Lise said     no
Correctly     no
Because I feuded with Lise     no
Because I hated witches/blood  
Was she writing that for Lise  
Is it her true sensibility    no
Feminist hysteria  
I mistrust her too because of that piece  
It shocked me     YES
If that's truly her I've been wrong about her     no
Was the work I liked flattering me     no
I'm more doubtful about whether she'll follow through with the PhD  
Did Phil doubt me like that     no
Did she borrow her fine judgment from me     no
But she lost it  
Has she lost it permanently  
Was she getting it from her man     no
Did she have it because of booze     no
Shd I assume she isn't going to make it     YES
She had a fine adventure but will want to stay where she is     YES
Did Lise ruin her     YES
Is that possible     YES
Because D didn't fight her  
If she wd let Lise ruin her wd she let me ruin her  
Did I     no
Lise ruined Susan and Diedre but not Emilee  
So the question is whether a student is suggestible  
Is Millie B still alive  
Is she still mad at me     no
Is she back on meds     NO
Did our work help her  
Did she go back to her family     no
Is she nuts     no
Shd I help Justin     NO
 
Meanwhile I want something from D  
I loved her ability to get the framework  
And want her to go on getting it  
She's smart but she doesn't have my strength     YES
I want my work to be worth something  
And it's not  
 
But she'll do a PhD  
A conventional one  
She has a framework but she didn't make it herself     YES
 
How shd I think of the [college] work     unconscious, responsibility, reversal, tyranny
Working against my father's tyranny     YES
Correctly?  
Working for cognitive justice  
But it's not the most effective way     no
As a forum  
Wd it be better to be doing art     no
That motive is different  
That motive is early love     YES
"One friend and one enemy"  

22

Another $1000 from Dave.

Laundry. The pleasure of a clean bed, watered plants, polished table. Meantime the sky opened to the west after six days. Cloud towers, palm trees bashed clean, groceries in the jeep for tomorrow, library books. Phone's charged, camera charging, excited.

The money has paid off Vancity with $300 over, or I could say has bought my beautiful audio machines and what I'll be able to do with them.

I'm happy too about being thinner, and how I look in a black turtleneck and the moonstone earrings, better hair off the forehead and smooth silver, ache not very often. Year of stretching behind me - pink face - better time altogether - thank you - Rowen in school and Luke liking to talk to me - money working out, a plan - the worst of leaving Tom done - a bike carrier - a trip tomorrow I can afford - the Up north section finally - this coherent sound little house - a month and a half of liberty after New Years.

There I turn on the Blackberry and fix its time and date, and then ping a message waiting. It's Tom returning my call. I phone him, Did you just call me? No it was yesterday. Short conversation in which I notice I have that fur-stroked-the-wrong-way turned-on sexual buzz going just from hearing his voice - the one that makes me laugh.

23 Borrego Springs

Thursday a bit after four. Tense getting started, scared of the freeway, will I miss the 67 turnoff, it's marked at the last minute. Traffic as far as Santa Ysabel and then sweet open moments. The sky lowered until near the junction on S-3. A bit before the San Felipe pass, the light I wanted, invisible high frequencies reverberating off the mountains, a solid hit of them. Then the way there's just a bit of hairpin climb before the air opens wide, wide, and the road lopes down at ease all the miles to the valley floor with its tiny buildings and green blots of orange groves.

-

I'm in Carlee's Bar waiting for a t-bone steak. Football on TV. Couples in red leatherette booths. It's early, the drinking crowd isn't here yet. Fans, shaded lamps, neon, Budweiser, Newcastle Brown Ale, a dull orange light.

I took the bike out onto back streets as it was falling dark. Near the high school there were two large owls calling, one trying to climb onto the other's back. The streets were empty and unlit.

24

Here's a whole day at the window.

A good book, 2010 Anna Lawrence Pietroni Ruby's spoon Spiegel and Grau. And Renee Flemming on how her voice is made.

Things still to tell: a card from my mother, a so-bad photo of her looking awkwardly compliant, and worst the trembling handwriting on the envelope, her shape of words the same but the line in tiny quivers. Oh poor thing so undone. She called again the day before I left to say the amaryllis had still another bud. It was what she lacks now, strong clear order trumpeting out.

I now understand how long her weak-headedness has been coming. When she wanted cards it was already that. When was it, twenty-five years ago when she was sixty? She was already awkward when I was 30 and she 50. I broke with her about the cards, not realizing her head was going. If I had known would I have forgiven it? "My mother has died." But was she ever what I thought she was? Did something break her? Ed broke her. The Mennonites did. I did too? It says no. Could I have saved her? No.

The second thing I want to tell is that I make more mistakes now, for instance when I'm formatting I more often have to do something over. The faults of attention I notice in driving. I am training myself to double-check more. I have to monitor myself when I walk. There's the way I don't find thoughts to interest me when I'm lying awake. And even here there is more erasing and trying again.

So am I going weak-headed like her? Am I already what she was at 65?

-

Cool air with the smell of beetroot newly dug out of the ground.

25

I'm ashamed of hiding out yesterday. I ate and read and almost nothing else and then lay dejected at night, and am so this morning too.

Is this spiritual death     no
Is it loneliness     no
Is it because I haven't taken my fences     no
Is it because of Mary     no
Is it because of eating     no
Did I regain all those pounds  
If so they weren't really lost  
It's wanting to feel  
And having nothing to feel about  
I'm living wrong     no
Did I zonk yesterday because I'm repressing     NO

Last night I saw the swimming pool lit and warm, a hole in the ground like a transilluminated sapphire. I wanted a ritual immersion, I wanted to float looking up at a black sky, but when I went back in my bathing suit the cover was on.

Will you lead me     process, anguish, balance in crisis
Instruction?   graduate, to intimacy, with your child self
She wants a mother interested in her  
The child is what I'm missing?  
I'm starved for a mother  
I come alive when I have one  
Does that mean I should find a therapist     no
Will you point (Qs)     improvement
Work intelligence  
Alright     YES

[Opposite page:

AIFF - FCP, Mac OSX, .wav standard Windows

AIFF encoder fr CD in itunes

sampling rates DV audio 48 kHz, CD 44.1 kHz

yes FCP supports 24-bit 96 kHz (most vid is 16-bit 48 kHz)

only uncompressed formats should be used, AIFF, .wav

x MP3, MPEG-2 or -4

try to match sample rate in all

BWF broadcast wave format is for timecode

to use CDs copy the track onto hard drive first, then import to FCP and convert sample rate

noise is inherent to electrical system, noise floor

signal-to-noise ratio

headroom - signal can occasionally go louder w/o distorting

dynamic range - loudest and quietest

compression - decrease loud sounds to be able to raise the quiet to compete with ambient sound]

Glorietta Canyon

Yes it's silent. One crow, one little warbly thing, something very faintly tinny. The crow keeps saying the same thing from different places. Three times the same word. Sometimes the near zoom of a fly. A very faint texture that is maybe many other flies at a lot of distances. Now something else, little needles of a whistling bird. Now the crow far away barking continuously.

The velvety buff on the mountainside is from dry brittlebush stalks. It lies fitted between the big shards of rusted brittle stone. That little bird ticks as it zooms low. Hummingbird.

The desert is damp today. There's not as much scent as in the valley. Barrel cactus in its fur of pink spines looking frisky. A few flowers on the chuparosa, an occasional ocotillo blooming. There's a hawk in hunting circles, its shadow waggling over rocks below. Another higher up. Creosote the darkest thing except for shadows in rock crevices.

It's a place simple in its facts and very complicated in its forms.

Three crows, only the leader speaking.

Sunday 26

I fell asleep early and woke at 4. Later when I saw the sky red I rushed out and took the bike across the mall parking lot to see the east which was a broad and high mess of marachino pink and orange. Decided to ride looking at the mountain instead, because it was faintly subtly luminously rose-lit so its folds and slabs and scales and dabs were all alive all over. Rode northwest and then north for miles along its flank, tire rattle on the rough surface of the asphalt. Fresh chill. Sunday early, Boxing Day, no cars.

Then after breakfast discovering I couldn't book for another night and packing suddenly and on the road getting more and more desolate. What was that.

Last night I went out not much before dark and headed back across to the row of churches. St Barnabas Episcopalian is the beautiful one, adobe walls and silver smoke trees. I was circling around through its empty parking lot and saw a little opening among palms. There on a little floor enclosed by a berm and a plastered wall, with adobe benches, was a labyrinth laid out in white pebbles. It was the loveliest human-made thing I'd seen in Borrego.

I had been as if longing to be able to go to church, longing for church not to be what it is, not false, not foolish, but instead what it could be when I was a child and we sang together, not the belief but the belonging. So I sat on the bench and talked to Joyce aloud, I said things I've felt but wasn't at that moment feeling, but the moment when I did crack into something real was when I begged to know, If I am alone this way because I did something wrong, what was it? Tell me what I can do to make it right.

And then I was alright, but coming through the tight winding passes after Santa Ysabel this late morning I was in anguish feeling a pull of death on the road, not a strong pull, but one I was having to talk to.

At the labyrinth I said to life, You trashed Frank, you trashed Janeen, you trashed Ed, you trashed Joyce, you trashed Mary, you are trashing me.

Today in the Jeep labouring to bring myself home again I was saying For 15 years I gave my girl heart to a man who didn't want me and now I'm ugly and there won't be anyone else who does, and it will just be more bleak years.

Do you call this being depressed     no
Do you have a word for it     the Work
It's necessary to feel because it's true  
Is it injuring my heart     no
Is there more I should be doing     NO
Am I supposed to be repenting of being with Tom     no
I had to do it because of my dad  
So it's his sin I'm paying for  
Is Rowen okay     no
Is Luke okay     no
If I feel this pain is it helpful to them     no
Is there anything you want to say to me     no

27

Someone eager to please - how it helped her to be that thing I no longer am.

Success conflict - "You've gone too far. You weren't supposed to step away from the pack. You've strayed from your own roots. You are by your nature an underdog."

I can do tremendous focus and dedication, I still can, but to what?

Do you know the answer to that  
You're going to tell me something about psychological work     YES
But I need a work form  
Are you willing to answer me in those terms   improving, action, anguish, integration
But I need a concrete task     YES
Grade 12, Trapline, the PhD, the garden - like that     YES
Are you able to answer that  
But you don't want to     no
Please will you tell me     YES (4 orange cards) conflict, come through, graduate, readiness
You're saying I'm not ready yet  
I'm not ready to know it  
Wands/clubs are enterprise  
Finish things  
Hone myself  
Assemble money     YES
Assemble machines  
Learn software     YES
Physical training  
Have faith  
Work on success conflict     YES

Favor writes "I was there as her doula. Her labor was long .... She was so focused, Ellie, and calm. Very strong. I loved that she kept saying 'I love you baby.' It was the first birth I'd attended (of three) that was natural - she got through with just Rescue Remedy! I'm sure she'll tell you stories. She told me your email wisdom helped her so much."

Carolyn's boy yesterday Dec 26 2010.

Ausstrahlung

28

Luke in the Facebook talk box.

Mbo page: Stockholm, St Petersburg, Bangkok, Naples, Russian Federation, Braga Portugal, Gent, Basel, South Africa, Rome, Nanjing, another Belgium, Arezzo, Oxford, Ho Chi Minh City, Bogotá, Bristol, Léon Spain, Göttingen, Catania Sicily, Eindhoven, Feltre Italy - those in November-December.

A lot from Wikipedia and Green Fuse but also no referring.

Tom's North Park notes - vivid and loving - we were on the couch with the laptop, he reading over my shoulder. It was just a list but there were colors and birds and my name and the word 'home,' and I felt what I'd given him, what I don't now have myself, and the liveness of feeling he still has and I don't, and some gratitude and missing me, as if it was a letter of the kind I always hoped for - the kind I understood. There was some of what I don't like too, flashy name-dropping encrusted phrase-making, but more simple-hearted being between. It was our New Year's visit. There was sun on the walkway. We untangled the mandarin, which had thrived in the rain, and the stemmy cassia. We were familiar and told our news. He liked that I was wearing the green silk pants tucked into the UGGs with the black turtleneck.

29

Started to write a dream, erased it, no don't write what happens just write the moments. I'm with two young men, London artists like Tony. One of them is holding me on a bed, lovely being held, he finds my hand behind him and holds it. I touch the other man to say I feel him too.

In a subway, dark, dirty, greasy old wood, with a man who was also at the conference. He knows the way and it's complicated, so I stick with him but then lose him when he goes to look at something, people filming maybe the homeless. Then I'm trying to find the way up and out. Dark dirty staircase. It stops at a barricade. Beyond it is an iron double bedstead with the mattress collapsed.

First vol of Up north. I've been through once, got the images placed mostly, shy off the density, at the same time feeling there is work in it, to be found in it, deciding what's worth using, what I couldn't do then, when I was holding dilation to too much because I didn't know what to notice, flou, so much undecided, and the flux making me an artist at the same time as it was disabling me as an artist. Matrix of bewilderment, is that what it takes. Now in a firmer time, shying away from the bewilderment, can I tell what was worth something, or just lay a track between the facts and a willed story.

30

To work with N1 I'm having to make a full excerpt, and liking to. It's slow but has let me find places that were out of order and better spots for photo links and a couple of cross-time links. It makes me consider the stoned pondering, and the notes, that I've skipped impatiently. They tell me the technology I was using to get the open moments I did find, which are why I still want to be with that person in that place, that autumn. If I clean it up a little the writing isn't bad. I mean I'll be able to read the edited excerpt with pleasure - should have it as a mirror page probably.

Yesterday found a web book by an Englishman who writes about the kinds of dilation I was sometimes finding. He's elaborating a two-world hypothesis about them, though more honorably than many, saying what's conjecture or ambiguous. He's one of those having to posit subtle other worlds because he has such a debased view of this one. None of what I was experiencing up north was other-worldly though it was often mysterious. It was this world loved, and imagining powers courted by emotional-intellectual risk and effort. What Logan said about making breathing a gorgeous enterprise, enriching the world not escaping from it. [John Heron]

I assumed then and still that art needs effort like religious effort, in that both are about being fit to meet something well. That claim larger than it seems, because 'meeting well' means quite esoteric sorts of attention and presence.

31

Two inches a year, the same as a human fingernail - fault creep.

1st January 2011

Finished going through N1, adding a few links, moving photos sometimes, using the excerpt edit to evaluate everything. It's long intensive work - this morning from 7:30 to 12:30 just on a bit more than half of N1-5. Toward the end of that month the solid writing - ie prose not fragment notes - got better. That crystalline January like a room I still want to inhabit. What I liked and kept this time - Helmer and Bernice, sometimes the bachelors, oh the days and nights, a few of the reading notes. Love and concrete adventure and indications of the mental work I did to get presence, a few. I'm thinking about how easily it cleans up now, but how I didn't have cleaning-up judgment then. Was setting up methods that wdn't have old forms of it, but also didn't have it, couldn't see what was wrong with it. I don't keep most of the attachment pain about Jam, though I notice how strong it was and that it's the same as I felt in Borrego.

Do you like the excerpt edit  
Do you want to say anything about it     judgment, child, love woman, writing (Kw)
I didn't have judgment because it was child and love woman writing  
I had wrecked work woman  
Love woman was good for photos  
Was work woman being rebuilt     later
Why I love the time is that it's love woman  
Given something to love  
Anything else?     no

-

Walter Webber at Nordhagen's New Years party next to me on the floor, or probably I was on the floor and he on a chair. He was in his 70s then probably. I was wearing a black pullover and when I'd warmed up, took it off. Walter noticed how quickly I did it. I've often thought of what it meant that he noticed that - it was intelligence noticing intelligence, and so I've thought of who he must have been, living as a cowboy without education through the pioneer years.

I have never since then thought about the work I thought I was doing there - coming up with a film - I never did understand how to do that - I worked in the ways I knew and muddled along but what I eventually made left out a huge amount of what I worked on - [the film] Notes in origin was a little something thrown off out of a huge matrix that hasn't been finally brought through. - Something was, an understanding of the draw of prenatal recognition was. Did it take all that to write what will we know? Maybe. I could never have written it earlier. Did the reading and thinking, the notes, make the photos possible - something, I'll think about it more.

60 Cloud View Road North Point, Rosie Nag

[diagram of the winter hexagon, Capella, Aldebaron, Sirius, Procyon, Castor and Pollus, Orion internal]

3rd

N1 is done, tonight collecting 1000 pixel versions for N2.

Getting the OAS letter ready -

4

Do light and vision instead.

Light-vision-imagining. From light to mind.

World and consciousness, something like that?     YES
The color of light, show slides?     YES
How mind comes from land     YES

Earthquake lights "size of a basketball hovering over the epicenter of an impending quake," "most likely the result of static electricity created when quartz-bearing rock is stressed and scraped."

'Luminosities.'

-

Evals. Bibi names "Ms Epp is very direct" as my strength. Bridie says "I was very uncomfortable with some of the things she said and a lot of the reading" and "how I feel clouds my judgment." Katie says "She's excellent at identifying the pressure points in things."

5

Dave got the photos finally - my loveliest gift - and can't see them - says the winter ones "are the best," "have the best use of light," as if they weren't all showing wonderful light, and as if he thinks he's competent to tell me what in my work is good.

That's pathetic     YES
I shouldn't have sent them     no
He was sending what he has and I what I have and his not being able to use it is irrelevant  
But my feelings are hurt  
I want my country to love my love for it  
Do you want to comment     rebalance, don't withdraw, recover success
People resist those photos     YES
I've been almost alone in loving them  
And yet I love them so much     YES
Am I mistaken  
Mistaken to love them  
Everybody else has been right     no
Is there something wrong with them  
That other people can see     no
Can you tell me what's wrong with them     come through, power, processing, practical
I'm scared of this     YES
Do I have any photos that are better     no
Is any art better     no
Can you point this     withdrawal
Was I right in what I was trying to do when I made them  
It came through as 'pure' and 'elegant'  
Which these are  
Are you saying I shouldn't work with them     no
The rejected child     YES
 
Is John Heron right about the lightness     YES
Cd I walk lightly that way at will  
Fasting changed my alignment  
Was feeling close to death part of it     no
 
Are they good as photos     YES
 
What would I have to do to walk like that     process, conflict between power and the child
What is the heaviness     maternal, recovery, shared, processing

6

Am labouring with the edit version of N2-1, two days so far and it's not done. It's the month I was working on oilrigs, staying internal in the midst of the most external of adventures. I edit out a lot of the self-observation and yet its idiosyncracy when it's edited gives the writing whatever charm it has. The Seth notes now obviously vacuous but David Cooper still holds. I like remembering it for the concrete, Jules and Myrtle and the man I liked at Hudson's Hope, the camps, the boys. I'd want to play with them more now but wd I be as enchantable by what I saw on the road? Steeped in marvel and sometimes pain. I mostly want to cut anything about Jam. Having to go overboard to find the good things I did find, I'm noticing that about deep art, it makes mistakes, it doesn't necessarily have good judgment. Cull after. But confusion frightened me, frightens me, unless it's brief. I was enduring confusion with a lot of valor. Writing in a way that wd get minimally, that was likely correct.

[Opposite page notes for dealing with a skin cream company, Queen's transcript service]

[Nursery scouting lists]

 

part 2


in america volume 22: 2010-2011 december-may
work & days: a lifetime journal project